The Mexican Year

How the hell does somebody like Nooshin just disappear into thin air in Mexico? She’s almost 6 feet tall, a giantess among mexicanas and mexicanos alike. Her right eye is crooked and wandering — and half the country is superstitious enough to recoil in horror from it, crossing themselves against the Evil Eye. Tiny scars ghost across her forehead and down the bridge of her nose. She’d have trouble hiding in the WNBA, let alone Mexico.

I’m going to find her.

That’s what I keep telling myself as I grind through these hours, fizzling with stress and exhaustion. The cellphone is welded to my ear. I’m probably racking up a zillion dollars in roaming charges and overage minutes, but what the fuck.

I’ve called every goddamn hotel in Guanajuato. Twice.

I’ve talked to that supercilious prick Beto — and just in case he was lying to me, the front desk secretary at the Baden-Powell Institute, the semester-abroad school where he teaches.

I’ve even enlisted the tourism director for the City of Guanajuato, a liver-faced Irishman named McMurphy. His #1 priority is making sure there’s enough green cervezas for St. Patrick’s Day tomorrow. But he made time to issue an emergency bulletin to every tour guide in the city, instructing them to be on the lookout for Nooshin.

All that, and still no trace of her.

Nooshin left Guanajuato. She left me. As incredible as that seems, it’s the only possibility left.

She has enough money for a bus ticket. I picture her face pressed against the glass of a sleek rumbling Greyhound bus — except in Mexico it’s Estrella Azul or Aventa, not Greyhound. She’s heading back to the house we rent in Tijuana, or maybe even America. In fact she could be across the border already. Those buses haul ass on the ultramodern toll highways.

That’s why I’m telling sob stories to disembodied voices on the phone, using a mix of perfect English and pretend-bad Spanish. My wife and I got separated…did she purchase a ticket on your bus line recently? Guanajuato to Tijuana, or just Guanajuato to anywhere? The customer service reps speak in calming tones. They’re used to dealing with lost and stranded Americans. But no matter how much they double-check and triple-check, they can’t seem to find Nooshin’s name in their passenger manifests.

After I run out of bus lines to call, I begin testing other mental images. Maybe her face is pressed against the glass of an RV, because she caught a ride with American retirees visiting Guanajuato. Or maybe she’s staring out the cab window of a semi-trailer, because she got robbed and now she has to hitchhike across the map. Or maybe…

Too much of this shit and I’m going to lose my fucking mind.

In the bathroom I try to avoid the Nick in the mirror. My reflection is haggard, with sunken eyes that have darkened into ultramarine and the makings of a helluva beard. I’m wearing my t-shirt inside out because I spilled on it and it was my last clean shirt and doing laundry, for chrissake — who the fuck thinks about doing laundry at a time like this? Some handsome portrait of true love I’m turning out to be. If she could see me now, she’d just keep going.

Have I ever told you how much I fucking hate relationships? They’re like being trapped in an absurd Kabuki play of coupling and artifice, where no means yes and yes means no, and stop is an invitation to keep going — unless it actually isn’t, of course — and running away means you want to be chased instead of given all the distance you apparently need, and “love” is a word that counts for everything and nothing at all. No wonder my most enduring relationship is with my right hand.

I thought it was different with Nooshin. Our relationship happened as easy as breathing. She was born without an inner bitch. Snarkiness and mood swings never afflicted her. Our conversations didn’t veer into the female dead zone of trash TV and celebrities and shopping and diets. And she put out.

Yeah, I should’ve said something right away, when she hit me with that accusation in front of the Museo de las Momias. “You’ll just dump me someday…” Standing there like a dumbstruck idiot wasn’t very rico suave of me. Where was the patented Nick Roberts comeback, the witty disarming line that makes her forget what she’s thinking? Or just an earnest denial?

But still, it was her fault for fleeing. Her fault, not mine. She should’ve talked it out with me, whatever it was. That’s what mature responsible people do, talk it out. Not madly sprint across a plaza like your boyfriend is trying to kill you and your unborn child. I mean, come on. What’s up with that shit?

That’s why I didn’t call her cellphone right away. The girl obviously wanted her space, duh. Let her call me — when she’s good and ready.

By noon she wasn’t good and ready yet.

Hours dragged off my watch. The sun turned into a bloody ball and sank behind the western crags. Sitting on the hotel veranda I finished the seventh half-assed chapter of my dissertation and began the eighth.

Finally I broke down and called her. I was half-expecting voicemail and half-expecting a tirade, but some Mexican kid answered. He claimed a tall gringa with the evil eye had come running along — “corriendo”, literally running — and paused just long enough to fling money at the neighborhood. Supposedly she also dropped the cellphone. I was like, nice try asshole. You pickpocketed her purse when she was guilt-stricken and doling handouts.

I hung up in frustration. It figured. Nooshin got out of my sight and started trying to save the world, one handout at a time.

Eventually moths swarmed the veranda lights and my laptop screen, and I retreated to our hotel room, and panic ate at me like acid. I was remembering her other bombshell — “I’m just going to go away” — and wondering if she meant it, honest-to-fucking-god meant it. Because there’s no telling with her. She’s the kind of brave that hovers between utterly fearless and just plain stupid.

This morning I woke up alone with a splitting headache and the Sahara in my mouth. After wading through empty Tecate cans to the bathroom and back, I called every hotel in Guanajuato, inquiring about a beanpole American chick with a crooked eye. Just to give myself something to do, you know? But her disappearance is sudden and complete and baffling, my own private Amelia Earhart.

That leaves me wondering if she slept outside on a bench somewhere, or found shelter with a sympathetic local, or hooked up with Beto…

I crack open a leftover Tecate from last night and contemplate our suitcase, lying in a corner. Her clothes are spilling onto the garish hexagonal tile, including the bras she doesn’t need. The plastic bag of dirty laundry is half-full of her stuff. Those strappy high-heeled sandals are waiting for her, just like me.

I marinate in remorse.

Nooshin. I said I loved you. Don’t you remember?

In the bleak overcast morning I see Guanajuato as I’ve never seen it before, a pastel maze becalmed in desertion. Most of the storefronts are shuttered and hung with hand-lettered cardboard signs that say CERRADO POR LA HUELGA — closed for the strike. Nobody likes it when the cops stage a one-day work stoppage. The entire population seems to have disappeared, escaping into steeply-terraced residential blocks or outlying pueblos or the mountainous countryside. All the tourists have disappeared too, shuttling away on tour buses that shroud the city in diesel exhaust. The narrow streets seem wider with nobody to fill them, and the cobblestones beneath our feet aren’t humming with the rattle of underground traffic.

Nooshin and I are weaving through an alley that scrapes at our elbows, and turns blindly at sharp angles, and sometimes dives under buildings like a miniature tunnel. Once upon a time I needed a map to find my way around Guanajuato. Now I’m taking a surreptitious shortcut that only the locals know about. Surreptitious because it will dump us onto the plaza in front of the Museo de las Momias — Guanajuato’s legendary Museum of Mummies — a surprise that will transform Nooshin back into her usual outgoing and talkative self. I hope.

She’s a withdrawn skyscraper of a girl, neck bent forward, contemplating the cobblestones that roll beneath us. The bangs veiling her face aren’t enough of a shield against the world. She’s also wearing her sunglasses, even though it’s overcast and there’s nobody around to impress. Her backpack seems to sag on its bony shoulder. When I reach out to hold hands, she takes evasive action and jams both hands into her jeans pocket.

“Hey, check out that cool balcony.” I slow a little, pointing at a curving sheaf of stucco that wraps around the corner of a mint-green building.

Nooshin barely raises her pointy chin, then quickly drops it again. “Yeah,” she murmurs. Her long strides haven’t shortened at all. They’re carrying her down the alley, away from me.

It’s been like this for a couple days. All our wide-ranging conversations about anything and everything have shriveled into terse exchanges, and her shyness is back. Last night she couldn’t even look at me when we made love. Normally I’d just give her the space she obviously needs — a couple weeks or even months of it — but this isn’t Phoebe or my prior girlfriends anymore, and I’m not the selfish and detached Nick. I’m trying to have a relationship here, goddammit. And it was easy with Nooshin, so easy there was never any trying involved, until suddenly –

“I thought you might be taking me here,” she says in a halting voice, as we exit the alley into openness.

“Ta-dah!” I announce tardily, waving an arm at the rectangular plaza leading to the low facade of the Museo de las Momias. “First thing on a morning when there’s a police strike? We’ll have the museum to ourselves!”

A statement of fact instead of hyperbole, maybe. The plaza is even emptier than I expected, a vista of desolation. A fringe of benches wait for tourists. The central fountain spits into the air without a single person ooohing and aaahing. In front of the museum are roped-off ticket buying lines with nobody in them. A plastic Fenix pharmacy bag is the only thing moving as it blows across the plaza.

Then vendors begin to swarm out of the tent-shops that flank the plaza. We’re hit with an onslaught of desperate Mexicans — old men with canes and limps, meaty women in shawls, surly teenagers and not-surly teenagers, little kids almost trampled underfoot. Mummy-themed crap of endless variety is waved in our faces. Mummy hats, candy mummies, keychains with mummies dangling, mummy doorknockers and windchimes and statuettes and kites. Everything but mummy panties, basically.

We shake our heads and say “No, gracias!” and make shooing gestures until they get the message — we’re not buying jack shit. The swarm dwindles away in defeat.

Nooshin is watching a little girl in pigtails toddle back to a tent. The mummy t-shirt she’s carrying drags on the ground. It’s decorated with a silkscreen of the tiniest mummy on display, a baby propped in fetal position.

Reading weakness in Nooshin’s profile, I clear my throat in warning. “That’s the shitty thing. Buy from one of them, you buy from all of them.”

She doesn’t say anything, but the sideways move of her dark iris prickles me.

I’m stuck hovering next to Nooshin, unnerved. It’s not an emotion I’m used to feeling. In acute discomfort I loop an arm around her slender waist, settling my palm on the jut of a hipbone. “A peso for your thoughts?”

Her tresses ripple more intensely in the breeze. She’s shaking her head.

“Come on. Tell me,” I almost plead.

After a while she quietly announces, “I’m not going to let you throw your life away on me.”

I stare at her ear, which disappears and reappears as the wind rustles her hair. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You need to forget I even exist. I’m just going to go away and — ”

“Nooshin, seriously. What the fuck. Is this some kind of pregnancy mood swing?”

She evades my grasp, pirouetting away. We freeze in our positions, me half-reaching in confusion, her standing with arms hugged tightly around herself. The pose causes her tanktop to ride up, exposing a sliver of caramel skin and the whorl of her bellybutton. Somewhere beneath it is –

“You didn’t choose me, Nick. We just got thrown together and now look what happened. Someday you’ll wake up and realize this isn’t what you wanted. I’m not what you wanted.” Nooshin sighs, a ragged mournful sound. “You’ll just dump me someday. You know you will.”

The accusation thuds through me, a painful tumbling trajectory down down down my mind and throat and heart, until it comes to rest in the pit of me.

Her sunglasses are aimed at a point between my hiking boots, but behind the smoky plastic she’s hanging on my reaction, waiting for me to say something. Anything. But I don’t. I’m paralyzed. This isn’t really happening to me. This isn’t my life.

Tears leak down her steep cheekbones and drip off her jaw. “Goddamn you,” she whispers. It’s only the third time I’ve ever heard her swear.

Suddenly Nooshin breaks into a dead sprint away from me, her Nikes slap-slap-slapping across the plaza, backpack jouncing wildly. She’s running so fast and frantically that her sunglasses fly off and smack the cobblestones, fracturing into pieces.

I think about stopping her or not stopping her, decide I want to stop her, try to find words that will stop her and halt this instant accelerating devolution, but she’s already traversing the plaza and disappearing into a side alley. That’s my last glimpse of her, Nooshin glancing over her shoulder in heartbroken beauty, all long scrawny limbs and flat chest and octopus ink air, that crooked eye wandering over me. And then the alley swallows her up, and she’s gone.

In the morning I wake before her, an instant hyperwarp into consciousness. One moment I’m drifting in torpid blackness…the next I’m staring at Nooshin, a dusky angel of scrawn and mussed hair, her delicate features smooth with sleep. We’re cramped together in this small bed, facing each other. Beneath the covers her naked skin is touching mine in about 10 different places.

I spend my first moment of consciousness drinking her in — her lush mouth, those cheekbones like ski slopes, the tiny scars ghosting across her forehead and down the bridge of her nose. The next moment of consciousness is when it hits me again. It. The imperative barreling through our lives like a runaway train.

We’re going to have a baby.

I have no fucking idea what that means. Well, only in the mammalian sense. Growing up on a farm you learn all about reproducing the species, except the species in question belong to the domesticated families of Bos and Sus and Gallus — that’s cattle, pigs, and chickens to you. But after the baby is born? I know more about the Stars Wars cosmos than I do about raising a kid.

My imagination rewinds through the only references I have. Chicklit I’ve read. Commercials I’ve watched on the Lifetime cable channel. Print ads I’ve seen in magazines like Parenting and Working Mother when there’s nothing else on the rack at the doctor’s office. I envision our trajectory through parenthood as a series of consumer cliches. Arranging a nursery for the baby and stocking it with colorful Fisher-Price tripe. Shopping sprees at Baby Gap and Kids-R-Us. Driving places in a minivan. That’s my life in seven months.

Then a different kind of advertisement pops into my head. The DeBeers kind, with a big honking diamond that’s supposed to be worth three months of salary. Not that the DeBeers empire was built by marketing to impoverished grad students. Three months of my stipend will buy a nice chunk of cubic zirconia.

I sag into the mattress, feeling ill with stress, and my temples thump with a rush of blood. What the hell is happening to my life? Having a kid? Marriage? This is fucking insane. I’m only 27 and not even done with my Ph.D. yet. I shouldn’t even be thinking about this shit.

After a while I carefully untangle myself and roll away, needing to piss — and almost break my neck when I slip on a piece of paper lying on the dusty tile.

Oh yeah. Now I remember. The floor is covered with the 6th chapter of my doctoral dissertation. Last night Nooshin was reading it when I returned from drinking with Beto. I tore the pages away from her and tossed them in the air. My favorite gesture of late.

“Fucking fuck!” I mutter, slipping and almost losing my balance again as I pad toward the bathroom.

“Nick? What’s going on?”

She’s sitting bolt upright in bed, sheets clutched to her flat chest. Her dark eyes blink nervously, the right one jerking in its socket. Then her gaze falls to the floor.

I raise a foot carefully. Pages stick to it. “I kinda forgot I, uh…”

“Yeah,” Nooshin agrees, trying to suppress a giggle — and failing. I must look ridiculous, naked and balanced on one foot in a sea of paper.

Then she slides out of bed and starts helping me pick up the scattered dissertation chapter, kneeling, her long inky hair sweeping the floor, spine a gentle slope of bumps. Together we make an impromptu work of performance art, a nude archetypal Adam and Eve treading on the same scholarship we’re picking up.

“So what did you think of it, anyway?” I ask.

Nooshin’s hesitation tells me everything I need to know. She’s choosing her words carefully. Trying not to upset me. “I think the research is all there, but the writing needs…something.”

“Don’t bullshit me, okay?”

Her bony shoulders rise and fall in a sigh. “It’s not as good as the other chapters, especially not the first one.”

That’s my dissertation for you. A decline from mediocrity into a complete waste of trees. I reach for another page of Chapter 6 — “Market Contours of NAFTA at the Korea Textile Maquiladora”. Nooshin has marked it up with underlining and little scribbles.

“I feel guilty, like it’s all my fault. You wrote the first chapter in Tijuana, before we…you know. Got involved.” A smile ghosts across her face. “Then you wrote the next three chapters in Chirbampo, before you knew I was pregnant. And now this chapter…” She’s avoiding eye contact. “I’m just a distraction.”

I find myself laughing. “We’re having a kid, for chrissake. Of course I’m going to be distracted.” Then my mirth dies away, replaced by an impulsive realization. “You’re not a distraction, Nooshin. You’re, like, the opposite of a distraction. You came into my life and clarified everything.”

She stands slowly, head tilted at a curious angle. The effect reminds me of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, if Venus was underfed and ethnically Persian and clasping handfuls of paper. “What do you mean, I clarified everything?”

I don’t know what I mean, not at first. I have to think about it for a while. “I’m not sure I can explain it, really. It’s like you came along and showed me that I’ve been wasting my life or something. With Phoebe, even with grad school.”

“You’re not wasting your life. Don’t say that, Nick. Getting a doctorate is not wasting your life.”

“It is if you’re not passionate about it. If you…hate it.” I glance down at my hands, which are tightening into fists and crumpling the pages they’re holding. My dissertation. Just another hoop of flaming bullshit. “I’m not doing this for me.”

Nooshin reaches over and gently pries the crumpled pages away from me, adding them to her half of Chapter 6. “Then who on earth are you doing it for?”

My gaze is roaming around the hotel room like a trapped animal. It briefly alights on the giant Evian bottle I bought to rehydrate myself last night. The ribbed plastic lies in a corner, empty and tossed aside. Suddenly my bladder is reminding me that it still needs relief. A convenient excuse to duck her question. I’ve already toured enough uncomfortable places in my psyche for one morning.

“Okay, so I think I understand the Stations of the Cross — but why are there 14 stations? Why not a lucky number, like seven? Or an unlucky number like 13, since Jesus wound up dying? Or a really big number like 100? Or even 1,000? Huh? Nick?”

I can’t answer Nooshin right away because my jaw is clamped shut. A reflexive clenching that threatens to shatter my teeth. I take a deep calming breath, and relax the muscles so I can open my mouth, and try to explain YET ANOTHER weird inexplicable Catholic thing.

My words come out like 12 gauge buckshot. The humorous irony of our situation is squandered on me. Me, the atheist who grew up Lutheran. Her, the softboiled Muslim. This, the Dia de Santa Anastasia — Saint Anastasia’s Day — a local Catholic holiday.

Nooshin is folded into a wicker chair on the hotel veranda, a mess of skinny limbs and sharply-angled joints. She’s wearing one of my plain white button-down shirts over a pink Hello Kitty tanktop and drainpipe jeans. Her hair is pulled back in a simple ponytail, revealing an intent focus on the religious procession that’s clogging Guanajuato. Behind her sunglasses the next question is percolating, I just know it.

Penitents flood through the streets in Abu Ghraib-style black slitted hoods and horsehair belts, dragging chains, suffering ritualistically for their Christ as he suffered for them. Gangs of bent men struggle beneath ornate icons of Jesus in all the Stations of the Cross. Little girls in angel costumes are marching with incense decanters. It’s the craziest godshit you’ve ever seen, if you’re a farmboy from Iowa.

Nooshin doesn’t seem all that impressed, despite her never-ending questions. I wish we could make a shopping detour into one of the many bookstores hidden away in these twisty cobblestone streets and dead-end alleys. Buy her a copy of Catholicism for Dummies or something. But Saint Anastasia’s Day doesn’t just clog the streets of Guanajuato, it also shuts down the stores. The entire city takes the weekend off and goes loco with religious fervor. You can buy crap like blessed scourges of barbed wire, Crucifixion-shaped candy, holy water, but that’s about it.

Apropos of nothing, Nooshin suddenly asks, “What happens when the Pope dies?”

At first I just stare in bafflement. Then I notice a portrait of Pope Benedict XVI bobbing in the crowd. The pontiff looks like beef jerky dressed in an Andy Warhol wig. “Well, a bunch of cardinals — 120, I think — get together at the Vatican and elect a new pope.”

She leans intently over her knees, filing away that piece of Catholic trivia. Behind the opaque curve of her sunglasses I can see her right eye. The crooked orb is wandering my direction, trying to look at me instead of the Saint Anastasia’s Day procession.

A bunch of Mexican men costumed as Jesus are filing past, bloody with stigmatas of tempura paint. I take a swig of the Diet Coke I’m nursing. “So all this is pretty different from Islam, huh? Especially the Pope stuff. I suppose that seems strange to a Muslim, the way Catholics elect their supreme leader and call it God’s will.”

“Mormons do the same thing,” Nooshin says matter-of-factly.

I watch my knee piston for a while. How the hell did she know that? The girl of neverending surprises.

“Actually, this is a lot like Islam,” she continues. “Like, the processions and carrying banners and stuff. Even the date reminds me of Islam. A couple weeks ago it was Arba’een.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Arba’een is probably the most somber day of the year for Shiites. It commemorates the final day of mourning for Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. He died as a martyr, just like this Saint Anastasia person.” Nooshin smiles bitterly. “All Shiites are supposed to visit his grave, but I’ve never been to Karbala. Iran was at war with Iraq, with Saddam Hussein, when I was a little girl. We could only listen to my grandfather’s stories about his pilgrimages.”

I’m remembering the newspaper I read when we arrived. El Correo de Guanajuato. It had a wire story on the Karbala pilgrimage in Iraq. “Sounds like the pilgrimages are happening again, now that Saddam Hussein is history.”

“Yeah. Some of Saman’s family was going to Karbala this year. It’s their first visit to the imam’s grave in 25 years.”

“I hope they get blown up by Sunni suicide bombers.”

Nooshin pivots her face toward me. Her crooked eye becomes a faint outline behind the smoky plastic. “You don’t mean that.”

“Actually, I do. They want to kill you, remember? To regain their family honor or whatever. How fucked up and Dark Ages is that?”

“Islam isn’t like that. It’s a beautiful religion.”

“You’re my only exposure to Islam. You and your family and your in-laws. So maybe I’m dealing with an unrepresentative sample here, but I don’t see anything beautiful about it.”

She colors with fury. “You’re prejudiced, Nick! Not only against Islam, but any religion. You’re even prejudiced against just believing in God. Because you don’t want to admit there’s a higher power than your stupid know-it-all self.”

“Gimme a fucking break.” I try to load finality into my tone. This conversation is so over.

“It’s true,” Nooshin says stubbornly.

I watch my knee piston up and down. “You’re only defending your in-laws because you feel guilty. And you shouldn’t. So what if you weren’t the good Muslim girl? So what if you fled an abusive situation? So what if you want a divorce?”

“So what if I’m pregnant with your child?” An eyebrow arches above her sunglasses. “I have a lot to feel guilty for. I’m the reason you’re going to get kicked out of UCLA. You won’t get your Ph.D. because of me.”

“Well yeah, but…”

I don’t finish the thought. I’m distracted by the tiny scars that ghost across her forehead and bleed into her eyebrows, reminders of the difficult truce between a little girl and her lazy eye. They look like shards of ivory in the bright sunshine.

Nooshin’s full lips compress a little, and muscles twitch along her sharp jawline. Scrutiny still makes her nervous. It was always the prelude to uncomfortable double-takes and teasing words and disdain. But she doesn’t turn away in shame the way she once did, resigning herself to rejection, a self-defensive reaction. Now she holds my gaze. Bravely. Or maybe just in hopeless resignation.

Just contemplating her like that — the imperfections of her beauty, and the beauty of her imperfections — my heart bursts into starshells, and I want to make her pregnant all over again. The impulse seems absurd at first, like revisiting a mistake just to make it again, but then I realize this is where I want to be. With Nooshin, an incredible girl who got under my skin, and into my head, and through my ribcage. I want to be joined to her for the rest of my life.